More than 2,500 years ago, a Phoenician ship, most likely a merchant bringing luxury goods from the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, ran into trouble off the coast near Cartagena, Spain. The ship hit the rocky reef of Bajo de la Campana.
This massive boulder lurks just below the surface and has been wrecking ships for millennia. The Phoenician ship sank and spilled its cargo, which washed into a sea cave and remained there for a few thousand years until excavations began in 2007 by archaeologists from Spain and the USA.
Hannibal’s flock
Archaeologists have recovered ceramic and bronze artifacts, tin and copper ingots, lumps of lead ore, amber and many elephant tusks. The tusks could help scientists unravel the mysteries of an extinct elephant population.
“If the ship sailed from North Africa, the ivory could represent the North African elephant population that became extinct sometime during Roman times,” said Patrícia Pečnerová, a biologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “We know nothing at all about these elephants as there are few historical records.”
The famous war elephants used by the Carthaginian general Hannibal in the Second Punic War in 218 BC. Chr. led over the Alps, most likely came from North Africa. They probably occurred throughout the region north of the Sahara and possibly along the east coast to Sudan and Eritrea.
But no one is sure what species it was.
“Some people think it might have been African savannah elephants based on what is more plausible from a biological point of view,” Pečnerová said. “However, others say they were probably small elephants, so they may have been African forest elephants.”
And still others say the creatures could even be Asian elephants — or a species of their own.
The ivory from the shipwreck offers a rare opportunity to generate genetic data on these extinct elephants and research their origins.
Pečnerová was the lead researcher in the EU-funded STAMPEDE project, which ended in May this year after 24 months and used genetic information from elephants across Africa to create a diversity reference map.
This allows her to insert ancient DNA extracted from the shipwreck’s ivory into today’s map to see if the elephants are genetically distinct or related to any of today’s populations.
window to the past
The trait tools developed by the project could also be used to analyze genetic diversity and monitor populations of modern-day elephants to help conserve them.
Information from the ancient tusks could show scientists just how genetically diverse elephants were before humans began to hunt them intensely and destroy their habitats.
“The ivory from the shipwreck is a window into the past,” said Pečnerová, a Slovakian postdoc who moved to Denmark in 2019. “We’re looking at elephants as they were 2,500 years ago, before today’s many anthropogenic pressures.”
Knowing these core values of natural diversity could help scientists decide whether to be concerned about the genetic diversity of modern elephants.
While human exploitation and associated population declines often reduce genetic diversity in animals, some species inherently exhibit and can cope with low levels of variation.
Having this information can assist in making conservation decisions, such as whether breeding programs need to focus on increasing diversity.
poaching and human trafficking
As in Phoenician times, ivory is still sold today.
Although the international commercial trade in ivory was banned in 1989, many countries still allow it to be sold within their borders. These domestic markets are believed to be the main source of elephant poaching and the ivory trade.
According to the WWF, there are approximately 415,000 African elephants and 40,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants in the wild worldwide.
More than 10,000 elephants are killed for their tusks every year. Between 2002 and 2011, the number of African forest elephants declined by 60%. There are now fewer than 200,000 of these endangered large herbivores.
More than half of the remaining African forest elephants live in Gabon, where almost 90% is covered by tropical forest. These forested areas make it difficult to combat poaching through foot patrols or aerial observation.
An EU-funded project called ForSE hopes the elephants themselves could alert rangers to poachers.
“The idea is to actually use the locomotor behavior of forest elephants to first understand how they respond to poaching activities and more generally to human activities in general, and then infer the extent of poaching based on their behavior and space-use patterns,” said Marie Sigaud, the project’s lead researcher.
ForSE, which started in August 2021 and will run until May next year, is a collaboration with the National Agency for National Parks (ANPN) in Gabon. Their patrols have fitted GPS tracking collars to elephants and provided data on poaching activity.
danger zones
In places where poaching is known, Sigaud examines how elephants behave and use space – how far they move and whether they venture into forest clearings, for example.
As a conservation biologist at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, she also analyzes differences in elephant behavior in areas with different levels of poaching.
Sigaud said animals tend to avoid humans and use any habitat they deem risky, especially when human activity is at its lowest. For example, species living in urban areas are often more active at night.
“So one of our hypotheses is that in areas with large canopy openings, forest elephants are more likely to be there at night than during the day,” Sigaud said. “We believe this will be different in areas where poaching is low or non-existent.”
Initial results suggest that elephant behavior changes in line with poaching risk.
This is because elephants often know what to expect because they have been shot at before or seen other herd members killed.
“You’re really smart,” said Sigaud. “Many elephants have already experienced poaching events.”
She said the patrols sometimes capture and tag elephants with old gunshot wounds.
In the future, the GPS data could potentially alert the ANPN to behavioral changes in elephants when they sense danger. This would allow patrols to be sent to the area to prevent poaching.
The research in this article was funded by the EU through the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA). This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU magazine for research and innovation